Glimmercat Education: edible craft

Let's talk about Beautiful B and the "Letter of the Week" Curriculum that we have all put together for you. Here's a preview page showing a glimpse of what we have in the packet:

Each of our Letter of the Week Packets includes a mini book with mini exercises and mini activities for children to practice and do.

It prints out on one sheet of paper, folds up and is just the right size for small hands.

We often begin our Week with introducing the Letter B. I will give small manipulatives to the children and let them fill in their Letter Color Sheet.

This is also the day we sing our Letter B song and talk about the story from the picture where Glimmercat found the baby's bottle:

But let's get into the B things we introduce in each day: First, is butterflies!

For this craft, the kids colored the butterfly first. The insides of the B were tricky to cut out. I found it easiest to let the kids cut out their butterfly along the dotted line and then handle the insides of the B myself.

We shaved up some broken crayons (the kids got to choose their colors), and then they spread them out as they wished between pieces of wax paper. I worked the iron.

They turned out so cute, especially hanging in the window! You may need to help them cut out around the butterfly antennae: those were tricky, too.

Butterflies are so fascinating to small children. If you get the chance, have your kids watch this delightful YouTube video that is a time-lapse videography capturing the building of cocoons by caterpillars, and then the adult painted lady butterflies breaking out of their little shells with fully developed wings.

We love our Memory Game for each letter that comes along! There is lots of practice for cutting here, or you could precut the squares so all that is left to do is play the game!

This little bat craft is easily put together with a big Brown pom pom for the bat body. You could even hang the little bats from the ceiling when you were all done.

On Day 2 and read over the activity and craft we have for Bears.

This is a simple cut-out and paste bear critter, and it would be great to read a storybook that includes bears, after doing this craft. One of my favorites is an oldie, but goodie: "Blueberries for Sal", by Robert McClosky.

This story is so sweet with such fun pictures and besides, it includes such fun "B" words: Bear, and Blueberries. I decided to do a Reading Literacy printable that would work with this story, so we have this fun lesson in the B packet:

Of course, you will need "Blueberries" or something that can pass as blueberries to put into your pail. I suppose, you could just use a blue marker. Yep, that would work. But it wouldn't be nearly so tasty!

We also did (as an extra idea) another edible craft (this would be more for our Homeschool friends):

We began with a slice of bread (I made homemade bread so it would be nice and soft, but any soft bread would probably work). We got out the butterfly cookie cutter and soon had perfect little bread butterflies ready for take-off.

The "paint" is simply milk that has had a few drops of food coloring added. The kids painted their butterflies using Q-tips (my favorite go-to preschool paint brush!).

The kids very carefully painted their butterflies. Then we added a sprinkling of sugar and a few colored sprinkles just to make them extra pretty.

You wouldn't think that milk painted toast with just a bit of sugar could taste that amazing, but to hear those children as they ate their butterflies, you would think I had fed them sweet nectar from heaven!

There are several more B activities in the Letter of the Week packet, along with our regular B curriculum (writing practice sheets, dot to dot, maze, etc.). For more information, check it out here:

Letter of the Week for Y

Letter of the Week for Z

Zazzle-Dazzle, we have a letter Z letter of the Week packet here. Let's talk about this fun letter Z.

We begin our letter of the week with introducing the letter along with a snoozing Glimmercat. Notice, she is surrounded by zinnias.

The old standby for Letter Z is usually the Zebra, and we definitely have our Z is for Zebra Day, including a Zebra "Matching the Letters" practice sheet.

These pages are such good review for connecting the capital and lowercase letters.

Now, you could make little foam zebra heads like this:

But in our packet, we have this interesting craft, that involves putting the stripes on a Zebra in a unique way, rather than gluing or painting them on. And it was fun!

First, I cut out the zebras and the rectangles for the kids. There are so many little tiny details on the zebra form, that it was better to not over-stress them by having them attempt this.

Next, I put just a touch of glue-stick on the back of the zebra and glued him temporarily inside of an empty salad box. (On the craft page, I suggest using a cardboard box, and that would work too, but this was helpful for us to use, since you could watch your zebra stripes appear. You can see, we have also added a line of black paint inside the box, near the zebra and there is a toy ball inside, too. (The toy ball didn't work as well as we were hoping, so we upgraded to a marble to get it to roll well).

Then the fun began. My son shook that box and he twisted and turned it, and as the marble rolled through the black paint, stripes magically appeared on the zebra.

What fun we had! The pictures are a little fuzzy because as you can tell, there was much shaking and jostling involved with this project. And it turned out great!

After Zebras, one of the next letter Z favorites is Zoo. We created several activities for Zoo.

This one involves making zoo animals out of rocks and the little images seen here. At the end, we had become zookeepers with our small collection of rock animals:

But we also created a printable where kids can create their own little zoo with this cut and paste activity:

For our reading literacy activity, we chose the book, "Never Ever Shout at the Zoo". And for our activity, the kids will need to use ordinal number understanding to put everything in order.